Jill Thompson

The 27th Annual Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards took place at the Indigo Ballroom at the Hilton Bayfront San Diego on Friday night, and it was a great night for diversity, for women in comics, for comics aimed at a younger audience, and for the future of the industry.

We make a regular practice at ComicsAlliance of spotlighting particular artists or specific bodies of work, as well as the special qualities of comic book storytelling, but because cartoonists, illustrators and their fans share countless numbers of great pinups, fan art and other illustrations on sites like Flickr, Tumblr, DeviantArt and seemingly infinite art blogs that we’ve created Best Art Ever (This Week), a weekly depository for just some of the pieces of especially compelling artwork that we come across in our regular travels across the Web. Some of it’s new, some of it’s old, some of it’s created by working professionals, some of it’s created by future stars, some of it’s created by talented fans, awnd some of it’s endearingly silly. All of it is awesome.

Publisher Locus Moon press has been working on the new anthology book, Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream, for about two years now, and it's asking for fans to help make the long journey come to fruition.

The book,which tasks creators including Paul Pope, John Cassaday, Jill Thompson, Cliff Chiang, J.H. Williams III, Craig Thompson, Carla Speed McNeil, Mike Allred and Roger Langridge, with drawing new, full-page Little Nemo strips in the style of series creator Winsor McCay, will come out in the fall if Locus Moon can raise $50,000 via Kickstarter. The project launched Monday morning, and by mid-afternoon, it was at around $13,000. Not a bad start.

Kansas City's Planet Comicon has steadily grown into what may be the biggest comics and pop culture convention in the Midwest. After spending several years in the Overland Park Convention Center, a mid-sized facility in a suburb of Kansas City, last year Planet Comicon moved to Bartle Hall, a much bigger facility in the heart of downtown. This year, the convention doubled in floorspace, drew cosplayers likes flies to vinegar, and brought in a litany of television and pop culture stars, including legendary rapper Darryl "DMC" McDaniels, pretty much the entire cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the puffy one himself, Sir William Freaking Shatner.

But this site is called ComicsAlliance, and what we really care about are the comics and the creators who make them. Click onwards for a sometimes-blurry Blackberry camera gallery of guests, friends, and artist alley residents of one of the fastest-growing cons in the country.

Getting all the way to issue #25 without a relaunch is a legitimate accomplishment for a Marvel Comics series in 2014, so the publisher and writer Brian Michael Bendis are doing it up big for next month's All-New X-Men #25, with a more than formidable list of contributing artists.

Ever wanted to be drawn by Jill Thompson or Colleen Doran? Or get Julia Baritz to draw your mom as a superhero? And in the process help fund a documentary about the history of women in comics?

Well, here's your chance. Sequart, the organization that produced Grant Morrison: Talking with Gods, The Image Revolution, and other comics-related documentaries has teamed with Respect! Films for a Kickstarter to produce a new film, She Makes Comics. Check out their video pitch and see some of the rewards after the jump.

If you've been following the story of Vertigo -- the DC Comics mature readers imprint that's home to The Sandman, Preacher, Scalped and much, much more -- you know that there was a time in the recent past when it seemed the once legendary label had lost its prestige, especially when founder Karen Berger left the company. Thankfully that downward trend has been steadily reversed with the progress of JH Williams III and Neil Gaiman's new Sandman project, critically acclaimed new titles like FPB: Federal Physics Bureau, The Wake and Trillium, and promising books to come like Hinterkind. All these projects speak to the variously dark and wild-eyed visions that defined the Vertigo line at the height of its influence, but what you may not recall is that this creative refocusing began in earnest where so many great comics do: within the pages of relatively innocuous anthologies.

On sale this week, The Unexpectedis a paperback collection of The Unexpected #1 and Ghosts #1, two Vertigo anthology one-shots released in 2011 and 2012, respectively, that signaled the imprint's aesthetic resurrection. The book compiles done-in-one horror shorts from the imaginations of some of comics' most enduring talents as well as promising newcomers, including one of the final works of master cartoonist Joe Kubert and a rare mature readers outing from DC's top superhero writer Geoff Johns.

In the description of her new Kickstarter, prolific comic creator Jill Thompson says she has always wanted to make merchandise based on her Scary Godmother character, but the rights were tied up for some time following an animation deal that produced 2003's Scary Godmother Halloween Spooktacular and 2005's Scary Godmother 2: The Revenge of Jimmy.

Now, those rights have reverted back to her, and she's making merchandise on her own, starting with a really, really fancy articulated fashion doll. It's a pretty good deal, too. Contribute $50 to the Kickstarter, and you get one. If you follow CA's toy coverage at all, you're probably no stranger to seeing similar dolls going for twice or even three times that amount.

Ever wondered what an adaptation of Vertigo's Sandman would have looked like hat it hit the big screen? The Empire Film Podcast, a prolific source of comics-related newsover the past couple weeks, asked writer Neil Gaiman that very question. The info that the acclaimed author offered up is... less than encouraging.

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